In the major financial markets of today, trading of financial instruments is largely performed using communications and data processing systems. For example, in the Interbank foreign exchange market, products such as Reuters Dealing 3000 (which includes versions providing conversational and anonymous matching functions) are used by banks to trade currencies between themselves.
Conversational trading involves a party initiating contact with a known counter party and negotiating trading terms between the parties using a conversational communications capability such as text-based messaging. To enable creation of contracts and to avoid the crossing of offer, counter offer or acceptance messages, the conversational capability may be half-duplex in the sense that only one of the party or counter party is allowed to transmit a message at any one time. Trading using a matching capability involves parties unilaterally placing trading bids or offers or other trading requirements on a central database. Parties also generally maintain credit limits in respect of potential counter parties which are stored on a distributed database. Matching is performed independently of the parties and if a match between a party and counter party is identified, and if sufficient credit exists between the parties, the trade is executed automatically and the parties notified.
With conversational trading, it is essential for each party to maintain a record of all completed conversations, whether resulting in agreed trades or not, for evidential purposes. These conversational records may be used by the parties' back office computer systems for settlement and other purposes. Often, a summary of the terms of agreed trades is also maintained for future reference and for processing by back office systems of the parties. This summary is generally referred to as a trading or deal ticket and generally contains at least the information required to settle an agreed trade—for example, the name of the counter party, the financial instrument traded, the price and volume agreed and any other terms such as the type of instrument or settlement period. Optionally, there may be stored within a ticket a further record of the corresponding conversation. Although conversations do not occur with matched trading, data for the ticket and the confirmation of the trade still needs to be maintained by the parties as a record of the trade agreed. Reuters Dealing 3000 provides facilities for recording ticket data at client-sited data storage devices when a trade has been confirmed by the user. Furthermore, Dealing 3000 has a facility for automatically generating ticket data on the basis of conversational data exchange performed using the product.
FIG. 1 shows in simplified form the computer systems architecture used in the conversational features of Dealing 3000. Data processing devices for implementing the product are located at a client site 10. The client, for example, is a bank which trades on the Interbank foreign exchange market. At client site 10, traders use the product by operating a keystation 12 which implements business logic elements of the product and is a local client of dealing server 14 to which it is connected over a local area network (LAN) 16.
Keystation 12 comprises several components including a graphical user interface, a local service manager, local network communication components, and dealing business logic components which implement the main functionality of the product such as managing outgoing and incoming calls with other traders, and analysing conversation data to generate ticket data. Dealing server 14 comprises several components such as local area network communications components and a data store for storing conversational data and ticket data generated by keystation 12. Dealing server 14 also acts as an aggregator of keystations so that a plurality of keystations identical to keystation 12 may be connected over LAN 16 and may communicate over dealing network 20. Dealing server 14 also comprises a wide area network communication component for sending conversational data to Dealing network 20 via a dealing network access function 18 which acts as an aggregator of connections to dealing network 20 and will typically have a plurality of dealing servers from different client sites connected to it. Typically, there will be a plurality of dealing network access functions identical to dealing network access function 18 each connected to dealing network 20. The individual dealing servers connected to dealing network 20 are administered by an administration server 22. Thus, it can be seen that the business logic components and data store for storing conversational data and ticket data are wholly implemented at the client site. The client/server components implemented at client site 10 are proprietary to Reuters. For example, keystation 12 and dealing server 14 comprise proprietary applications for implementing the Dealing 3000 product. Keystation 12 may further comprise standard client applications such as a Web browser for accessing network resources over the internet, for example. However, this access is not enabled over local area network 16 or via dealing server 14, but rather over other conventional network access arrangements.
FIG. 1a shows in simplified form the computer systems architecture used in both the conversational and the matching features of Dealing 3000. Keystation 12, dealing server 14, LAN 16, dealing network access function 18, dealing network 20 and administration server 22 are as described above and provide the infrastructure for implementing a conversational dealing capability.
Keystation 13 and matching concentrator 15, both at client site 10, are also connected to LAN 16 which in turn is connected to central matching server 19 via several further matching concentrators 17 which are remote from client site 10. Matching concentrators 15 and 17 are part of an fan-like arrangement of matching concentrators such that central matching server 19 is connected to a plurality of level 0 matching concentrators which are in turn each connected to a plurality of level 1 matching concentrators and so on through a plurality of levels of matching concentrators until the connection to a client-sited matching concentrator is made. Thus, the fan-like architecture of matching concentrators provides communication capabilities between a plurality of keystations, such as keystation 13, and central matching server 19 whereby bids, offers and other trading requirements may be communicated by users of keystations to central matching server 19 which performs the matching service and may execute trades between parties in real time and notify the parties of the trade. Central matching server 19 is also connected to administration server 22 for administration purposes. Keystations 12 and 13 may be implemented in a single terminal device thus providing both conversational dealing and matching capabilities from a single terminal.
Various aspects of the Dealing 3000 product are shown in simplified form in FIGS. 1 and 1a. Previous dealing products as well as aspects of the dealing network operated by Reuters are described in detail in the Applicant's granted patents U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,388,489; 4,525,779; 4,531,184; 5,003,473; 5,034,916 and 5,195,031 which documents are incorporated herein by reference. For ease of understanding, some of the main technical aspects described in these documents are summarized below.
The documents describe a data communications network for conducting conversational video textual data communications—i.e. text typed at a keystation which may be displayed on a computer screen and sent over the network to be displayed on other computer screens. The system comprises a central message switching node connected to one or more terminal controllers at one or more subscriber premises via data communications links. Each terminal controller at subscriber premises may be connected to one or more keystations comprising a keyboard and a screen so that a trader may type in messages for sending to other traders at other subscribers premises and also receive messages from other traders. The conversation is locally stored at the subscriber premises by the terminal controller connected to the keystation and a hard copy of conversations may be printed out. Keystation screens may be split to display at least two different video conversations and also to display a conversation in one split screen and supplementary data retrieved from a database connected to the central message switching nodes of the central system.
Conversational text is sent in packets which may be less than the total displayable data content. Messages are addressed to particular keystations by unique identifiers and the central system has a packet switching network for routing received messages to the appropriate destination. The communication is half-duplex in that a keystation cannot both transmit and receive at the same time, but messages may be prepared prior to transmission while receiving a transmission from another party. Messages received by a keystation are displayed with the unique identifier of the sender as well as an optional interest message indicating the reason for the communication.
Additional functionality available at keystations includes i) the ability to create a contact list as well as an inhibit list to accelerate and screen contacts made throughout the network; ii) a “deal key” function that may be employed to immediately confirm receipt of a sent message on the screen of the sender; the use of a mouse and screen pointer used with a window display—by pointing to a contact and performing a single click an interest message is inserted into a command line ready for transmission, by double clicking, the interest message is automatically transmitted to the appropriate contact; iii) using a conversation analysing component connected to keystations to parse a trading conversation and automatically provide context-sensitive trading data messages in real-time—for example, the analysis may recognise the type of transaction occurring, and the details of the transaction; error messages may be provided highlighting inconsistencies in the data analysed; furthermore, tickets are created dynamically on the basis of the analysis.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,003,473 describes a communication system for transferring ticket data stored at a local database at a client site to a remote back office database thus back office records of tickets may be made without the back office computer continually polling the trading system.
The matching aspect of Reuters Dealing 3000 employ a similar computer systems architecture as has been described above in relation to the conversational aspect of Reuters Dealing 3000. The business logic components will of course implement matching capabilities rather than conversational trading capabilities and, likewise, data communicated from client site 10 over matching network 20 will be trading bids, offers or other requirements rather than conversational data. Furthermore, one or more central servers will be connected to a matching network 20 for implementing the anonymous matching process.
Various matching aspects of the Dealing 3000 Matching™ product, and previous matching products, are described in greater detail in granted U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,501 which is incorporated herein by reference.
In the Dealing 3000 product, other data may be sent to client site 10 over dealing network 20 such as real time data feeds of financial information and other news.
It is important to realize that in the prior art described above, the business logic components which process trading data, for example to automatically generate trading tickets for confirmed trades, are executed using dedicated computer systems of each trading party at a trading party site. One object of the present invention is to provide a centralised trading service which may be delivered from a central service data centre but which provides the functionality of the products described above, including the real-time conversational or matching trading facility and the automatic generation of trading tickets for confirmed trades.
International patent application publication no. WO 00/39719 and WO 00/55775 disclose computer-based matching systems for party and counterparty exchanges. Parties and counterparties may post their requirements with a central server over the Internet using a Web browser at a client terminal. The system enables consumers to obtain foreign exchange transactions directly with other consumers thereby cutting out the Interbank foreign exchange market. A trade can be identified which is at the mid-point of the Interbank bid/offer spread. The invention disclosed in these two documents cannot be used by the banks themselves to trade on the Interbank foreign exchange market. Furthermore the invention is not capable of providing a conversational trading facility or of generating or storing conversational trading data or trading ticket data.